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Global Ambiguity in Nineteenth-Century American Gothic: A Study in Form, History, and Culture

Global Ambiguity in Nineteenth-Century American Gothic: A Study in Form, History, and Culture

Paperback

Series: Routledge Research in American Literature and Culture

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 0367539020
ISBN13: 9780367539023
Publisher: Routledge
Published: Sep 25 2023
Pages: 126
Weight: 0.46
Height: 0.30 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

As part of a larger attempt to understand the dynamic interactions between gothic form and ideology, this volume focuses on a strong formal feature of the American gothic, global ambiguity, and examines the important cultural work it performs in the nineteenth-century history of the genre.

The author defines global ambiguity as occurring in texts whose internal evidence supports equally plausible and yet mutually exclusive interpretations. Combining insights from narrative theory and cultural studies, she investigates the narrative origin of global ambiguity and the ways in which it produces culturally meaningful readings. Canonical works and obscure ones from American gothic authors such as Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Louisa May Alcott, and Henry James are reexamined. This study reveals that the nineteenth-century American gothicists developed the gothic into an aesthetically sophisticated mode that engaged intensely with the pressing problems of American society, including moral citizenship, slavery, and the social status of women, and reimagined social realities in politically constructive manners.

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